


Stare Decisis

by draculard



Category: Defending Jacob - William Landay
Genre: Animal Death, Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Murder, Misogyny, Mother-Son Relationship, Nature Versus Nurture, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Self-Doubt, Violence, animal cruelty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-06 09:30:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20289241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: These are Laurie's precedents, the thoughts she keeps returning to at night.





	Stare Decisis

“To stand by things decided.” She’s heard Andy use that phrase before, _ stare decisis, _ and she remembers enough from high school Latin to know what it means. It means to adhere to precedents in the court of law, to take guidance from old rulings, to remember what your forefathers have told you.

These are Laurie’s precedents, the thoughts she keeps returning to at night. These are the things she adheres to, laid out in her mind like the neat, organized lists she kept in her notebooks at Yale.

Precedent One:

When Jacob is a baby, he learns how to scowl before he learns to smile. He uses his gums and the power of his tiny jaws to bite Laurie even before he’s started to grow teeth. He cries incessantly — long, howling throat-tearers that must leave him sore. 

He learns how to torture her with every new milestone. From the moment he first grasps her finger, he learns that it’s possible to grasp it too hard, that even as small as he is, he can cause his mother pain. He can knead at her breast when he’s suckling, or he can bite her nipple with the stubbly white heads of his new teeth.

They switch to baby food when Jacob is five months old, and sometimes he holds the very last bite in his mouth without swallowing, just holding it there, soft and mushy on his tongue, until Laurie has cleaned his face and removed his bib. Then, when she picks him up out of his high chair and rests his chin against her neck, he opens his mouth and lets it all slide out, right down the collar of her shirt. 

“It’s malicious,” Laurie says to Andy. He dismisses her; he’s fed the baby himself and Jacob never does that to him. 

“He refuses to _ eat _ it, sometimes, sure,” says Andy. “He’ll turn his nose up and throw a fit if I try to feed him mashed peas. Sometimes he’ll knock the spoon out of my hand or throw his bowl to the floor, but he doesn’t _ plan _ things, Laurie. Not just to piss us off — not for _ any _ reason. He’s a baby, for Christ’s sake.”

So Laurie drops it. Later, Andy will claim they never had this conversation.

_ We had no problems with Jake as a baby, _ he’ll say. Or: _ This is the first I’m hearing of it. _ Or: _ If you had a problem, Laurie, you should have said something before. _

But what happened with Jacob as a baby hardly matters, after all.

It’s only Precedent One.

* * *

Precedent Two:

Jacob was in kindergarten the first time he got in trouble at school. It wasn't just him the teacher singled out — he was one of three boys who went missing after recess, when the kids were following Mrs. Simpson single-file up the stairs to their classroom. 

With his friends, Derek Yoo and Josh Haeber (who would be ditched in fifth grade and replaced by a long series of equally uninteresting, slightly dweeby teenage boys), Jacob hung back from the back of the line, stopping at the bottom of the stairs. Down here were the pre-school classrooms — the only classrooms on the first floor — and the boys made their way to the door together, peeking in at the younger students, whispering amongst themselves.

Later, when discovered and scolded by Mrs. Simpson, none of the three boys could adequately explain what they’d been doing. 

Derek, staring at his feet: “I dunno.”

Josh, unconvincingly: “We got lost.”

Jacob, with the strong eye contact and conviction of a poor liar: “We just thought they were cute. They’re so little.”

These words, in part, would be echoed in private sessions between the boys and their parents after school. 

Karen Yoo would say, in her simpering, non-confrontational tone, “Derek said it was Jacob’s idea.”

And Josh’s mom, a plump blonde woman with a grating, colorless voice, would say, “That’s what Josh said, too. He said he was scared Jacob might push him if he said no. You know Josh always follows the rules. He’s scared of teachers.”

“But why would Jacob want to look at the pre-schoolers?”

That was Laurie, and nobody answered her. In a way, she already knew. The boys had told them, in a roundabout way: they were all five, and the pre-schoolers were four. They were big and the pre-schoolers were little.

_ I bet we can do whatever we want to them, _ Jacob might have said, eyeing the only children in the whole school smaller than him, smaller than his friends. _ Look at them. They can’t fight back. _

* * *

Precedent Three:

Jacob never had a girlfriend, but that didn't mean he never learned how to treat girls. He had TV; he had books. He learned what he thought was right from macho bad-boy characters in 80s and 90s movies that were constantly playing on local channels in the evening. 

He learned to harass the girls, to say bad things about their bodies, to make nasty implications about the color of their pubic hair. He learned to touch a girl’s shoulders, her hair, the small of her back — to make her notice him purely by how uncomfortable he made her. 

Maybe he didn’t realize this is what he was doing. Maybe he really took those movies that seriously; maybe he thought he was in the right.

But Laurie recognized his behavior right from the start.

Laurie knew.

Silently, without Andy’s notice, she started to catalog the little moments she witnessed between Jacob and the girls in his class. She noted every incident of hair-pulling. She heard it every time Jacob used the word ‘slut.’

“He’s going through an edgy phase,” said Andy. “He’ll grow out of it, just like he outgrew — well, you know. The rough-housing.”

At the soccer field, where Jacob liked to hang out during Derek’s games, Laurie watched her son canoodle up to a fifth-grade girl. She watched him pinch the girl’s arm when she tried to get away, holding her in such an iron grip that she squirmed in her seat. 

Did he outgrow the rough-housing? Laurie wondered. Or had it simply shifted into something new? 

“Boys will be boys,” said Andy — or something like that. And somewhere, Laurie was sure, that little girl’s parents were telling her,

“Don’t worry about it. He’s only mean because he likes you.”

But Jacob, Laurie knew, really didn’t like anybody.

* * *

Precedent Four:

The rabbit.

The less Laurie thought about this one, the better. It swam to the front of her mind at the worst moments, surfacing when she was most at peace. One moment she was eating breakfast with her family and the next she was staring at her plate, her eyes glassy, and all she could see was the string of minuscule intestines and the wet, red crunch of tiny bones. 

A hawk injured it, Jacob said. At least, that’s what he thought. He just found it that way. He was trying to save it. 

Laurie liked to imagine that hawk. She’d played through the scenario in her mind so many times it was more real to her than any of her memories. She could see it sitting at the top of a telephone pole near their yard, scanning the ground for victims — saw the regal curve of its beak, the lethal shine of its talons where they gripped the wood. 

She could see it pouncing at the sight of the rabbit, swooping down from its perch for the strike. She heard the high-pitched scream as it tore a wound in the rabbit’s stomach and then flew away again — spooked, perhaps, by the arrival of a human. A teenage boy careening into the yard on his bike, unaware of what waited for him.

The thing was, she knew it wasn’t a hawk.

The thing was, she could imagine Jacob tearing into that rabbit — into Ben Riskin, into Hope Connors — just as well. 

* * *

Precedent Five:

“Did you see the news?” asks Andy.

“Jesus, yeah. They’re not…?”

It takes him a moment to catch her drift. 

“No,” says Andy, the word an exhalation. “No, they — it’s out of my jurisdiction. She’ll be tried in Lincoln.”

All Laurie can do is nod, too numbed by the news to say anything else. Later, she and the other moms will discuss it in hushed tones when they drop their kids off at school.

_ Unthinkable, _ they’ll say, that any mother could do that to her children. The details will become muddled, this case blurring with others they’ve all obsessed over in the past. A mother arrested when dead infants are discovered in her garage; a mother who burns herself alive, her children unconscious beside her and doused in gasoline; a mother who drowns both her young sons in the family bathtub, the door locked while the oblivious father reads a newspaper outside.

And then this case, no less horrible for its familiarity, for its almost mundane details which all of them have heard before:

A mother who drives her car right into a tanker truck, killing her children in the backseat. She herself, miraculously, has escaped with only minor injuries. 

_ Unthinkable, _ Laurie says, just like the other mothers. She imagines Jacob, difficult and distant and mean, and can’t imagine herself ever hurting him, no matter what.

_ Unthinkable, _she says.


End file.
